“Bloody hell!” Henry yelled as two boys ran in front of the Toyota, playing chicken. They were not supposed to do this. As the hill leveled out and we entered the main area of the camp, a whole group of kids were running after us, waving and shouting, “Hawadga!”—white man.
As I swung open the door and jumped out of the cab, the heat hit me like the blast from an open oven door and the kids surrounded us. God, they were lovely, the kids: the rough ones running around, shouting and laughing; the shy ones standing like kids stand everywhere in the world with one leg hooked behind the other, rubbing their eyes and then putting their fingers in their mouths, as the health workers had spent the last five years teaching them not to. Two of them were wearing glasses made of straw, modeled on our sunglasses. I bent down and tried them on. They all screamed with laughter as if it was the funniest thing that had ever happened.
We usually had lunch at twelve but I had asked everyone to be back up at the cabana by eleven-thirty, ready to greet Malcolm and the new doctor and have the lunch. At ten-fifteen I was through with my jobs and ready to talk to Muhammad, but then there was a problem in Sian’s eye clinic because some of the patients had started demanding five Nambulan sous to have their eyelids turned inside out. They said that people in Wad Denazen, which was another, bigger camp about fifty miles away, got paid five sous to have their eyes examined like this.
“They say it should be the same here,” said Sian despairingly.
“Typical Wad Denazen,” I said. There were some Italian relief workers there who were pretty overemotional and lazy. The French were bad but the Italians were worse.
“What shall I do? It’s dreadful that they’re asking for money when we’re trying to help them.”
“Tell them if they don’t want their eyes examined you won’t be able to find out what’s wrong with them and they’ll go blind. And die.” I said. “Horribly.”
“I can’t tell them that,” said Sian, wide-eyed.
“Just be firm about it,” I said. “They don’t really expect the money. They’re just trying it on.”
“But it’s dreadful to—”
“They’re only human. You’d try it, if you were that poor.”
I looked at her troubled face. Actually, maybe she wouldn’t. Oh dear. I remembered what it was like when you first arrived. There were lots of things which rather let you down with a bump. I wanted to stay and talk to her but I had to get on.
Someone came running over from the hospital to say they wanted some IV fluids quickly, which, for some reason, were locked in the other Land Cruiser, and only Debbie had the key. Debbie was a vast girl from Birmingham, with a dry take on life who had been at Safila since the first time I came out. She was brilliant with the refugees. As I hurried along the path to where she was, looking at my watch, I heard a voice behind me saying, “Rhozee.” It was Liben Alye sitting under a little tree holding Hazawi and smiling at me lovingly and hopefully. I felt a stab of irritation, then another one of guilt for having had the stab of irritation. I loved Liben Alye, but he never understood about being in a rush. When I first saw him, sitting with a group of old men during the bad times, I had noticed him because of the way he was holding this baby, stroking her cheek and smoothing her hair. It turned out that all his children, six of them, and all his grandchildren except Hazawi had died, which was why he always kept her with him. I squatted down beside him and shook his hand and touched Hazawi’s cheek at his invitation and agreed that it was indeed very soft. And I admired her long eyelashes and agreed that they were indeed very long. I turned my wrist so I could see my watch and realized that I was indeed going to be very late for Malcolm. Ah, well.
It took me ages to find Debbie, and then she couldn’t stop what she was doing because she was in the process of extracting a Guinea worm from someone’s leg. “I can’t stop,” she said, “or the bloody thing’ll come off my matchstick.”
I watched while she wound the yellow, stringlike creature very, very slowly round a match, pulling it out of the skin.
“Bloody long bugger, this one,” she said to the woman, who grinned proudly.
She carried on winding delicately with her chubby fingers until the end of the worm came out and it hung, squirming, on the matchstick.
“There you are,” she said, handing it to the woman. “Fry it up with a bit of oil and some lentils,” and she acted out an eating movement, so that the woman laughed.
“What d’you reckon with Linda and this doctor?” said Debbie, as we hurried back to the vehicles. “Is she going to be shagging him or wot?”
“Search me,” I said.
“Her mouth’s as tight as a choirboy’s arse,” said Debbie.
“Sure is,” I said. “Well, um, not that I’d actually know, of course.”
The kids were running along with me again as I walked to Muhammad’s shelter. Most of them had their heads shaved with just one little tuft left in the middle. They all chose different shapes for their tuft so it looked quite funny if you were taller than them. I rounded a corner, and there was Muhammad, standing at the entrance to his shelter.
The kids melted away. Muhammad was a striking man with a shock of fuzzy black hair which was almost Kenneth Kaundaesque in its verticalness. He wore a djellaba so white as to be absurd.
“Rosie,” he said. “You have been very industrious today. Have you decided to increase your productivity?”
It was a relief to get inside his shelter where it was cool and quiet. Most of the refugees lived in huts, but Muhammad had managed to get hold of the materials and the space to build himself an exceptionally airy and elegant establishment. It was like our cabana, an oblong building with rush-matting walls, designed so that a breeze ran through. In places, harsh white points of light broke through from the outside. I settled down on a low bed, waiting for him to make tea before we could talk. He had a bookshelf leaning against one wall. The Ginsberg and Fink remaindered books were still there.
It was twenty past eleven but there was no explaining the need for haste to Muhammad. There was no hurrying the arrival of the tea; no question of abandoning ceremony and proceeding in an expedient manner. Especially if I was late for something.
Muhammad moved in stately fashion, to and fro, fetching tiny cups, two more sticks for the fire. Sugar. More water. A little more tea. Another twig. A spoon. Damn him. He was doing it on purpose now.
Eventually, finally, with a self-satisfied glint in his eye, he presented me with a tiny cup of tea, obviously too hot to drink, and settled himself down.
“So.”
“So.”
“You are very excited this morning.” Muhammad had a thin, reedy voice and a deep laugh.
“No, I’m not.”
“Yes, you are,” said Muhammad.
With extreme difficulty, I maintained a lofty silence.
“So,” said Muhammad eventually. Ha! My point. “So what is the cause of this agitation? Is it the new doctor?”
He was such a pain. “No, of course it isn’t the new doctor, for God’s sake.”
He gave his deep laugh, then looked serious. “So then perhaps it is the Teeth of the Wind,” he said dramatically.
“Oh, God, Muhammad. Call them locusts, please.”
“You have no poetry in your soul. It is tragic,” he said.
“Come on, Sylvia Plath, what have you heard?”
“I hear that there are swarms five miles across, blotting out the sun, plunging the earth into blackness,” he said.
“And what have you really heard?”
“It is not good,” he said, serious now. “There is no food in the highlands. The rains have been poor for many years now. The people are living on nothing and only trying to survive until the harvest.”
“But the harvest will be good this year?”
“Yes. For the first time in many years. Unless the locusts come. Then there will be very bad famine and the people will come here.”
“Is there a locust plague? Are they swarm
ing?”
“They are not flying, but I have heard that they are hatching in three areas. You know that they begin as grasshoppers and then they march—in a vast, seething, living carpet?”
I looked at him levelly. “Yes. Muhammad, I know.”
“If the people had the pesticides then they could spray and destroy them, but they have nothing. Even if they had the chemicals it would not be possible to spray from the air because of the Aboutian fighter jets. Soon the winds will be blowing east–west and will carry the swarms across Kefti and into Nambula.”
“And do you believe all this?”
He shrugged and raised his hands. Then he looked down and said, “It is possible.”
It is possible. I felt a surge of panic again. Usually he dismissed these rumors as nothing. “How can we find out?” I said.
“For now we must wait, reflect and discuss.”
I wanted to stay and talk this through, but it was eleven-forty. I had to go. “Malcolm’s going to arrive any minute with the new doctor,” I said, getting up.
“I have something to show you,” Muhammad replied.
Of course he had something to show me, given that I was late. He took me out through the back of his hut. There, growing in the mud, were three spindly tomato plants bearing a handful of tiny tomatoes of the type which are particularly expensive in supermarkets at home. He knew he was not supposed to do this. The refugees were forbidden to cultivate. That would have turned a relief camp into a permanent settlement.
Muhammad picked one of his six tomatoes and gave it to me.
“Thank you,” I said, touched. “I’ll have it stuffed.”
Then he put his hand on my shoulder and gave me a look. What was it—friendship, solidarity, pity? I got all brisk and flustered. “I’d better go,” I said.
When I got back to the Land Cruiser it was locked and Henry had the key. It was twelve o’clock now and everyone else had gone back up to the camp on time as I had asked them to. I drummed my fingers on the front of the car and waited, hoping Henry had not gone up with the others and forgotten that he had the key. What I hadn’t told Muhammad was that we were already short of food in the camp. We were supposed to have had a delivery a fortnight before but the UN had sent a message over the radio to say that the food would not be coming for a few weeks because the supply ship had not arrived in Port Nambula. We were going to have to start cutting down everyone’s rations anyway, even without writhing living carpets covering the whole of Kefti, and massive swarms of giant-fanged locusts blotting out the sun.
I looked at the group of kids running round the Land Cruiser, giggling, trying to jump up into the back, and remembered the feeding centers of the last famine. We used to have one shelter for the kids who could feed themselves, one for those who were too weak to feed themselves but might live, and one for those who were definitely going to die. I suddenly wanted to burst into tears. I hadn’t toughened up as much as I’d thought.
CHAPTER
Four
I dreamed of bumping into him in Safeways: walking along the aisles side by side, making jokes about the other customers, scampering about buying absurd foodstuffs to make each other laugh, tinned meat pies, blancmange, packets of dried chicken curry. Unbelievable that at one time in my life I spent hours and hours thinking about this, working out the fine detail of the fantasy.
Once an actual real meeting had been arranged with Oliver my head was completely taken over, like a nest with a cuckoo in it. I used to attempt to ban him from my mind by reading a book, and I’d read the same sentence four times without noticing. I would watch the news and not take in a single word because I was thinking of him. All I could concentrate on was my new Africa project, because it was infused by Oliver with sexual promise. On the Saturday morning before the meeting, I persuaded myself that I really did need to go to Safeways: not the one where I lived, but another, several miles away in the King’s Road (where Oliver lived), since their range of handmade pasta was more extensive.
It was tragic, really. I dressed and undressed several times in preparation for the expedition. I did not want to look too dressed up; I wanted to look stylish yet casual, as if I always looked like that on Saturday mornings, and also thin. I put full makeup on, then suspected you could see the foundation in the hard daytime light, so washed the foundation off and settled for eyeliner, mascara, lipstick and blusher, then started again without the eyeliner and lipstick. I wore new white underwear, then changed it to black. I asked myself if it was weird to wear stockings and suspenders under jeans and was unable to see my way to a clear answer.
After I had spent over an hour in Safeways, and returned again to Safeways to purchase a bag of frozen scampi of which I had neither need nor want, and he still did not appear, I cursed the heavens for conspiring against me. “Your behavior is insane and sick,” my friend Shirley said when I confessed all this. “If I hear the word ‘Oliver’ once more this evening I shall bite your head.”
Oliver himself became sick. He lay, feverish, in his flat which was vast and airy with white pillars. I tended him. I washed the sheets, made him shepherd’s pie and brought it on a tray with flowers in a little square white vase. Then I changed the pie to grilled trout with watercress, and new potatoes steamed in their skins, because shepherd’s pie is too heavy if you are sick. His mother arrived. She was glamorous and rich and she was just popping by with some champagne. She didn’t have a clue about caring for him, none. He had never known true love and care. But she took to me like nobody’s business. “I’ve never seen him so happy with anyone, my darling,” she whispered to me, in her gravelly Sobranie smoker’s voice, with a conspiratorial wink.
The meeting was scheduled for six o’clock on Wednesday. At five-thirty on the Tuesday Hermione banged down the phone particularly huffily. “Sir William wants you to go upstairs. Oliver Marchant’s up there. He was in the area, apparently, so he wants to have the meeting now instead of tomorrow.”
It was a disaster, a complete disaster. I had set aside that whole evening to prepare for the meeting: to go to an aerobics class to clean off those extra few ounces; to have a steam bath and soak myself in scented oils; to prepare my outfits. In fact, had the meeting not been brought forward a day, I might have missed it altogether, since the toiletry preparations and outfit choices might have prevented me leaving the flat at all. As it was, I considered Oliver’s premature arrival one of the worst misfortunes which had ever befallen me. I only just had time to get my makeup on.
As I walked into the room and saw Oliver sitting there my brain emptied completely and my mouth went dry.
“Ah,” said Sir William, “Oliver. This is our representative from the publicity department, ver’ ver’ good, Rosemary ah . . .”
“Richardson,” finished Oliver, smiling in a fatherly way. He got up and shook my hand. At his touch, chemicals began to charge around crazily in my body shouting, “WARNING WARNING, sexual alert, all systems to pulse.”
“How are you?” said Oliver.
“Fine, thanks.” My voice came out unexpectedly high. We were still looking into each other’s eyes.
“Glarrrh,” said Sir William, clearing his throat, “glahum, well . . .”
“So. Still not turned into a pizza?” said Oliver, which was quite cheeky considering my boss was still standing looking at us going “Glahum.”
“What’s that?” said Sir William. “Wantin’ a pizza?”
“Maybe later,” said Oliver to me, but looking back at Sir William.
During the meeting Oliver did most of the talking and directed most of what he said to me, which went straight to my head, naturally.
“It’s a phenomenon which fascinates me,” he was saying. “Celebrities have been promoting causes since the First World War, but you watch: this will become huge. In five years’ time no cause will be complete without an accompanying star to promote it.”
I made an odd noise. Sir William glanced at me disconcertedly.
“Ver’,
ver’ interesting,” he huffed. “Course, celebrities come from all walks of life. Not just a question of world of entertainment, all sorts of areas, prominent figures, benefactors.”
“Quite so,” said Oliver. “Business, publishing even, as with yourself.”
Sir William pulled at his beard, gratified. I was still embarrassed about the odd noise. It had been meant as a murmur of agreement.
“But what this program is actually about,” said Oliver, “is the way Third World aid is entering the mainstream of popular culture. Before Geldof it was dreary, it was a question of black and white envelopes plopping onto the doorstep. Now giving is becoming hip and synonymous with a good time.”
“Ver’ true, and as we’ve bin sayin’. Goin’ out there meself, with the books. Bit of a mercy dash,” said Sir William, then looked at me. “Glahum,” he said, nodding at me. “Glahum.”
“Oh. Do you think it’s likely you might want to feature Sir William’s trip to Nambula on your program?” I said very quickly.
Oliver smiled and winked at me. “It’s certainly an interesting angle for us, with the combination of Sir William and Nambula and the books. I take it these are the Keftian camps we’re talking about?”
“That’s right,” I said, drooling at his knowledge of world affairs.
“Well, I certainly think we should discuss it further,” said Oliver. “When things are a little more developed.”
Afterwards, as Oliver and I stood on the steps of the Ginsberg building with the golden evening light falling onto us through the trees, he said, “Do you want to come for a drink?” just like in the fantasies. I couldn’t believe it. I was wildly happy. Then a split second later I remembered I hadn’t done my legs and wondered in a panic if there was any way of shaving them in the ladies’ loo.
Even in the car it was like a dream, his hands on the wheel, his thigh in soft dark blue suit material next to my knee in its sheer black—tragically—tights. The doors of the car were cream leather and the dashboard was walnut. The instrument panel twinkled and glowed as if we were in an airplane. We didn’t go to a pub, we went to the sort of restaurant where if I had asked for a razor the waiter would have brought me one on a white octagonal china plate, without question or comment.